What Is Feminist Art?

Take "Wack!" The most striking thing about it is how current its art feels, though it's all decades old.

"Wack!" has the same mix of media you'd find in any contemporary biennial: Lots of video; installations of all kinds, ranging from a feminist "clubhouse" built from mattresses to a room-size sculpture made of sand-filled pantyhose; plenty of photography, staged as well as documentary; detritus and documents left over from performances and conceptual projects; a smattering of idea-driven painting.

And the show has the same political charge and drive as a lot of very recent work in those media. Even some of the most innovative experiments of the 1960s, such as the conceptual abstraction of Sol LeWitt or the radical video and film works of Bruce Nauman and Michael Snow, had centered on asking questions about the nature of art.

The feminists cared less for art than for the important things it can be used to talk about.

And because gender affects just about every aspect of human experience, feminist artists found occasion to talk about almost everything. They dealt with topics that leading artists have been broaching ever since: bodies, class, race, consumerism, the art market, colonialism, political and cultural power.

Even when they borrowed approaches dreamed up by men, the feminists gave them new political heft. At first glance, Eleanor Antin's 144 black-and-white shots of a female body, arranged in a 4-by-36 grid, look like plain-Jane conceptual art, perhaps addressing issues such as photography and form. In fact, Antin's grid represents four daily shots of the artist herself, trimming her nude body down to a more "ideal" size through 36 days of dieting. It's called "Carving: A Traditional Sculpture," riffing on the ancient Greek idea of the male artist who whittles away at gross matter to find the ideal beauty -- usually slender, female beauty -- hidden deep inside.

The feminists used all kinds of art toward a single end: digging out from under centuries of maledom. The best work in "Wack!" takes on that task with a commitment and aggression that most of today's art never manages. Even after four decades, the show's most whacked-out pieces still push you off balance.

To get into the show, you have to brush past a 12-foot-tall, blood-red vulva suspended from the ceiling, woven from sisal in the gnarly style of a classic hippie hanging. It's so supremely brash it makes you laugh and squirm at the same time. Many of the female and feminist themes in this show, as well as the simple concentration of them in one place, can leave even fans feeling vaguely squirmy. We're clearly not used to an exhibition that's all woman, all the time, even though we seem to have no trouble with other shows drenched in testosterone -- which would be almost every exhibition that we've ever seen, judging by the warriors and courtesans and macho brushstrokes in their works, and by the males who crafted them.

There's a huge dose of discomfort in footage of a public performance first put on by Yoko Ono in Japan in 1964. For "Cut Piece," Ono sits onstage in an auditorium and invites audience members to climb up and clip her clothing off with scissors. Ono's role in the event invokes a pure, classically female vulnerability, while there's everything from worried tenderness to raw misogynist aggression in the reactions of the cutters. And of course there's also something empowering in Ono's refusal to react, whatever's done to her. She took the passive resistance of the civil rights movement and made it the medium of art.

The work of Danish artist Kirsten Justesen also seems to deal with victimhood, or helplessness at least: A 1968 piece called "Sculpture II" shows a young woman naked and in a fetal position, inside an open cardboard box. It seems to associate womanhood with the vulnerability of infants, but also with their unrealized potential.

A British feminist who called herself Cosey Fanni Tutti pushed more aggressively into problems of women, power and subjection. She addressed the complex issues of sex and pornography by becoming a real porn star, modeling for grossly low-end, hard-core rags and taking money for it. The room that documents her art, full of all kinds of ugly and degrading shots, is genuinely hard to take -- as it ought to be, given the subject it addresses.

Has Tutti retaken control of the female body, or does her project demonstrate its ongoing and inevitable degradation at the hands of men?